Geospatial data: Vector files
Nairobi Workshop: Day 1 and 2
Josh Merfeld
University of Queensland
David Newhouse
World Bank
2025-10-20
Introduction to geospatial data
- One estimate says that 100 TB of only weather data are generated every single day
- This means there is a lot of data to work with!
- Note that this is also problematic, since it can be difficult to work with such large datasets
- Geospatial data is used in a variety of fields
- Agriculture
- Urban planning
- Environmental science
- Public health
- Transportation
- And many more!
The amount of geospatial data is useful for many applications!
- Geospatial data can be highly predictive of e.g. poverty
- Urbanity
- Land class/cover
- Vegetation indices
- Population counts
- etc. etc.
- More importantly: it’s available everywhere!